


A Broad and Ample Road

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Bookuniverse, Difficultconversations, Established Relationship, F/M, Kirsten Beyer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 08:37:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15239565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "She is silent as he orders up two coffees, and a plate of brownies, and makes her way to the couch. She curls her legs up, twisting out to look at the stars streaming past the fleet. It’s only when he sits down he notices she has retrieved the book, and the picture of Mollah is balancing in her hands. She sets it gently down on the open pages, so the image is staring up at them."I thought Beyer was going to deal with this in AOI but she didn't, so I did. Not as beautifully, and not as cleanly, but I gave it a go.





	A Broad and Ample Road

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to KillerManatee for beta'ing this beautifully a few months ago. I never posted it because life got crazy.  
> Thank you JHelenofTrek for the inspriation.  
> I thought Beyer was going to deal with this in AOI but she didn't, so I did. Not as beautifully, and not as cleanly, but I gave it a go.

* * *

“A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,  
And pavement stars—as stars to thee appear  
Soon in the galaxy, that milky way  
Which mightly as a circling zone thou seest  
Powder'd with stars.”   
―  **John Milton** , _Paradise Lost_

 

  
He doesn’t know why she kept it or perhaps, more accurately, he doesn’t want to know. His people don’t tend to retain images; it’s a custom associated, primarily, with the morbidness of the ancient pioneers, and not with the concept he’s supposed to believe in, the idea of letting people go.

Of course, he’s a hypocrite for pretending to be capable of that, when her death – he’s able to think it now, use the word ‘death’ – found him at an absolute pause, suspended between living and being dead himself, and, for the most part, dreadfully drunk.

He tries not to think on it too much, because it still makes his hands tremble and his mouth dry. When he thinks of it, his mind immediately recoils into another memory; Proxima Station, for their last and their first night, and it calms him and he ceases the terror that is about to consume him.

So yes, he’s a hypocrite, because after her death he transported to Indiana and imposed himself on Gretchen Janeway and asked for all the images she was willing to share with him.

 _Let me see her as a child._ _Let me see her first academy photo. I don’t want to see an engagement one._ _She loved her father didn’t she?_

 _She loved you,_ said Gretchen.

_I think that’s what’s killing me._

And he had cried, and asked if he could keep the image of her when she took command of _Voyager_ , a few weeks before she took command of him.

Gretchen had taken pity, and put it in an envelope for him and hugged him so tightly he thought he might shatter into a million pieces.

 _Enough of the whiskey,_ she’d said gently.

And he’d known it was time to move on.

He still has it, stowed away much like she stows away the one currently in his hand, but he’s never told her he has it. He feels like it will be sharing a secret he isn’t ready to, not yet anyway.

So a hypocrite, for certain.

The little face stares back at him, and it strikes him as odd – and just a little bit incongruous – that she looks just as he imaged their child would look. And yes, he’s imagined it, and no, he’s absolutely never shared it with her. But even when he’d first seen Mollah, he couldn’t help but think of how much she seemed to fit his incredibly private, and not altogether appropriate, imaginings. She wasn’t his, not in that universe, but her dark hair and eyes had been jarring, making him pause and stop and think of what could be.

What his child, with the woman he loves, may look like. In the flesh, real, not imagined.

He may not have shared it with her, but she knows. They have skirted the territory of this conversation like prowling beasts, aware that coming too close to it might rip the fabric of their calm happiness. She does not want to talk to him about this, but they need to. They need to understand where they both stand, how to draw the lines, and how to decide what they need or want.

He needs to tell her it’s okay, and that his choice is made, no matter what she chooses.

And here is Mollah, the girl she did, and did not have, by another man. Staring up at him, innocent and unknowing, from the coffee table in her quarters.

He isn’t even prepared to open that can of worms. The strange, misplaced jealousy he feels that Kathryn, in any vein of existence, has been loved by another man. There is an irony in this, obviously, because she was hardly vestal prior to their relationship. So it’s an entirely unsuitable jealousy and yet it is there, and he has learned never to ignore how he feels when it comes to Kathryn Janeway.

That way lies madness, and convoluted metaphors which don’t lead to honesty.

“Chakotay!”

She suddenly appears from the ‘fresher, dressed for a quiet night; vest top, leggings, hair loose around her shoulders.

“You’re early.”

He doesn’t imagine the accusatory tone as she rushes to the table and scoops the photo back into the book she obviously keeps it in. “I was just-“

“It’s okay, Kathryn.”

“You should have told me you were coming,” she says, sour and cold, slamming the book closed and taking it towards the shelves.

“I didn’t think I needed to announce myself,” he answers sharply, tired from a day of work and irritated by her tone.

She turns on him, hands on hips, hair whipping out behind her with the force of the move.

“Don’t,” he says suddenly, holding his palms out in surrender. He has no energy for the preamble, the show of a conflict, before the actual event. “No need for that. You don’t have to hide it - her - from me.”

She looks bewildered by his sudden shift in tone, and then her shoulders slump in defeat. Her chin drops onto her chest for a moment, then she looks up, bluster fading as a sadness he cannot name (does not want to name) takes over her.

“This is a conversation we need to have Kathryn,” he says gently, turning his palms up and out to her.

“I don’t want to.”

 “Because we want different things?”

She bites her lip, avoids his eyes, “Because I...” 

“You always want coffee,” he smiles, slides off his jacket and sets it across the couch, “let’s start with that.”

She is silent as he orders up two coffees, and a plate of brownies, and makes her way to the couch. She curls her legs up, twisting out to look at the stars streaming past the fleet. It’s only when he sits down he notices she has retrieved the book, and the picture of Mollah is balancing in her hands. She sets it gently down on the open pages, so the image is staring up at them.

“Can I tell you something, and you’ve got to promise not to be alarmed by it?” He asks.

She looks at him, eye brow rising, “It depends.”

“I asked your mother for a picture of you, after you died. I keep it in the envelope she put it in when I visited her. It’s a bit dog-eared, and I keep it in the third drawer down in my quarters, beside my medicine bundle and my socks.”

She smiles, and though it is tight, he can also see her relaxing into this. She trusts him, at least they have that.

“My point is I get why we keep pictures. I could have found thousands of you in numerous data bases, but it didn’t feel as real as to hold the one I have. It was all I had of you, something tangible and real. I get it.”

She is silent for a moment, “No, you don’t.”

“Try me then, and see if I can learn.”

She lifts her eyes to look at him.

“Do you want children?”

The sudden bluntness of it feels like a misstep - onto the conversational equivalent of a mine, if he’s honest - but he’s already got one foot on it.

“Yes.”

She wastes no time, “I don’t.”

The flat nature of it seems to widen the chasm she has suddenly thrust in between them.

“I figured.”

He has nothing to do now but be silent, because he doesn’t know where else this can go. She has as much as put a stopper on any concept of compromise or even discourse, so he can do nothing but let her make the next move.

“If that means this is over...” he’s glad to hear the tremble on those words, “then I’ll understand. I’ll be broken, but I will understand.”

“No, it isn’t over but I need to hear why, _I_ need to understand.”

“Isn’t it enough for you to know I don’t want them?” She’s defensive again, chin tipped defiantly upwards.

“You’re not my C.O. here, we’re equal. And anyway, you don’t intimidate me Kathryn. This conversation is important, and we need to have it, and you can’t avoid it by deciding to bully me.”

Her spite is evident for just a moment on her face, before she again capitulates to his logic. He knows her authority is both her defence and attack, and while it should wound him that she does it, he knows how to cope with her. Heaven knows he’s had to learn it. But it’s painful to watch her try and skirt around their realities sometimes, by demanding a silence from him that she is never going to get.

“Don’t say I bully you.”

He shrugs, “Don’t say you didn’t just try.”

He places his hand on hers, “This, and our love, is too important to me, for us to _not_ have this conversation.”

She nods and quietly admits, “Me too.”

“Then everything, all cards on the table - ugly or not - and no command personas. No battling your own feelings.”

“That’s easy for you,” she says, without a hint of irritation. “You’re so calm, and well balanced, and it throws me.”

“I don’t mean to,” he feels his patience slipping.

“I know,” she answers wearily. “I know we need to talk about this, but I have to admit that it scares me.”

He nods, and wraps her fingers in his own, and waits until she’s ready to say whatever she has to. Kathryn Janeway admitting to being afraid is a rarity so precious that he doesn’t know what to do with it; so he does nothing, and that seems to do the trick.

“I can’t be a mother, Chakotay,” she eventually whispers into the quiet between them. “I just-“

He lets his emotions override his careful treading, “You would be an excellent mother.”She shakes her head slowly.

“I used to want it, so very badly,” she says. “I told you, remember, on my fortieth birthday.”

How he could forget, he thinks, recalling that conversation and the pain concurrently. He had made dinner, he had gifted her a copy of ‘Paradise Lost’ and they had spoken, in vague and unpolished metaphors, about a future they might never have.

And here they are, present and real in that future, and yet somewhere the lines have shifted – he cannot even guess where, for there is too much that has gone before for him to even attempt it – so he simply nods.

He watches as she twists her fingers, weaving them together, locking and interlocking them.

“I can’t ask a child to live this life, to live my – our - life. I used to think I could strike a balance, but I see now that I am too far down this path to choose the other one.”

He thinks he understands her; he thinks he can even agree with her. The woman she was nearly a decade ago, the man he was too, are consigned now only to memory. It doesn’t mean though that their new shapes are any less whole, or any less deserving of a chance to raise children and bring a life into this world.

“When I was captured by the Cardassians, I prayed,” she interrupts his thoughts, her voice so quiet he has to strain to hear it. “I prayed, I swore I’d give up anything, everything, if the pain would just stop. If they would just stop. And for a while after, I did – I gave up everything I was. I did things I will never be at peace with, things I will never forgive myself for. But you know that, you know that about me. I don’t want children, because I don’t want them to ever know the potential I have for destruction. I don’t ever want them to be in the kind of danger I have been in. I don’t ever want them to hurt like I have. So I keep her,” she points to the picture. “To remind myself that I wasn’t denied her, and that in another life, I got to be a mother. That some Kathryn Janeway, somewhere, had that happiness. But not me, not in this universe.”

She takes his hand in hers, and her voice is impassioned and breathless and he knows it’s because she has the desire to make him understand her, as if she can breathe the idea into him, make him consume her beliefs and swallow them and hold them as deeply as she does.

But he cannot think those terrible things of her, because he knows her better than he has ever known anyone, but as equally he does not live in her skin, and he cannot comprehend the punishments she sees fit to meet out on herself.

“I wanted it so badly, once, but I chose this life. I chose _Voyager_ and all of the things that make it impossible for me to be a mother. And anyway, you believe in fate, if things are written in the stars then I think my fate is to be childless; how many times has the universe tried to tell me this? I lost Justin, my life with Mark was taken from me – I think that’s a clear message. Don’t you?”

He shakes his head, is about to try and talk her down, but she keeps going.

“And I love you, more than I’ve ever loved anyone I’ve been with. But I can’t do this for you. I can’t go back now, it’s too far down the line. A part of me wants to – so badly I ache with it – but the other part, too big to ignore, tells me I can’t do this. And I’ve made peace with that voice Chakotay, I made peace with it in our fifth and sixth year in the Delta Quadrant. It was something I lost sleep over, wrangled with – hell one night I considered proposing we give it a shot –“

He cannot hide the surprise on his face and she laughs, just a little to the left of soreness.

“I was struggling,” she mutters wryly. “My holographic boyfriend had just malfunctioned, you know?”

He considers asking the question and she can evidently see him weighing it up.

“You can ask me. All cards on the table, right?”

“Is that why you struggled so much those last few years?”

She nods, “Part of it, I suppose. I struggled with that, with the lack of intimacy, with guilt… all of those things, and more. But I made peace with it, when we got home, I made peace for the first time in my life and I can’t let you take that peace from me.”

Her sermon seems to have drawn to a close, and his understanding of her reasoning is so much more nuanced than it was before. Her decision is informed by every awful element of her life, from the Cardassians onward, and he is shocked to find himself understanding and, perhaps, even agreeing with her. It does not mean, though, that he doesn’t feel the need to counter with his own argument.

“I think you’re failing to consider the positive points of us having a family. I’d be a good father, and I want to share that with you, and I think you’d be an excellent mother. I think children can bring a happiness that we don’t even understand until we experience it, and I fear we’d be losing out on something by choosing not to do it. I also think you are choosing to consider all the elements of yourself you dislike, and blindly ignoring the wonderful thing that would make you a good mother. I could list them, but I know – “

“I’d rather not hear it,” she finishes for him. “I hate when you get sentimental, it embarrasses me.”

“I think it needs to be said,” he places his fingers over her lips. “And if you interrupt me, I’ll start again.”

She nods, showing her capitulation if not her agreement.

“You’re fair, passionate, clever, dedicated, strong, hard-working, fun, and above all, you have a capacity for love that I think is rare. You don’t believe it, but you love with a selflessness that is breath-taking. That would make you a wonderful mother.”

She blinks once or twice, and he sees there are tears glittering in her steel eyes.

“And I know I haven’t changed your mind,” he says softly, and finally he makes his choice too. “And I don’t want to change your mind, Kathryn. I want you in my life, and now I know our parameters,” – she smiles wryly at this – “I can make my peace with it. I just ask that, if you change your mind in the next few years, we speak about it again.”

“I won’t Chakotay, so I can’t have you harbouring any hope of that. The most you’re going to get is a dog,” she says dryly, and he can do nothing but laugh.

He pulls her against him, and wraps her in his arms and kisses her crown.

“I can live with that,” he says softly.

She stays where she is, “I did think about it a lot, after the encounter with the Denzit. I even asked the Doctor.”

He’s surprised about this, and he’s glad she can’t see his face.

“We were hardly in the right place, emotionally, and I wonder if we even are now, but I needed to know. He said at my age it was still a very likely possibility. I think he got quite excited actually. But I think I needed to hear that to come to my conclusion. It was strangely cathartic to realise I wasn’t just choosing not to because of my biological clock, but because I had very valid reasons.”

“They are very valid,” he says gently. “And I understand them.”

And he does, and in the silence which wraps around them like a blanket – nothing else but the gentle hum of the warp core – he mulls over her argument and is surprised by the peace he finds in it too. Children _were_ important to him, but he has to acknowledge that in having Kathryn, something he has wanted more than anything else in his life, he will not get to have them. On balance, the sacrifice doesn’t feel as huge as it might, and that reassures him that he is choosing the right kind of loss. And choice is everything.

“You know this changes nothing, Kathryn? We needed to know where we stood on this, but it makes my commitment to you no less valid than it was an hour ago. Perhaps more valid than it was, actually.”

“Is that your attempt at a proposal Chakotay?” She turns in his arms, a teasing smile on her lips. “Because I’ve done this more than the usual once. That will not do at all, I’ve been proposed to before and it’s been far less practical.”

His thoughts track back towards Venice, and the engagement ring stored in the envelope along with her picture. A black diamond. It was, it is, the perfect metaphor. He doesn’t know if it’ll ever see the light of day, because he’s learned just to roll with the punches, but he hopes it will.

“If I ever propose, Janeway, it’ll be far more romantic than this. And you’ll be better dressed,” he grins, kissing her nose. “Dinner?”

“Please.”

He makes towards the replicator to serve the meal, as she closes the book over again, the picture tucked neatly away; a secret kept, and not expanded on. It comes as no surprise to him that the image of Mollah is tucked neatly, snuggled up to Milton’s verse.

He watches her roll up onto her tiptoes to reach the top and slide it onto the shelf.

And it fits, he thinks, this ending. 

In the gentle shutting of the pages, things close over for them too, as equally as other stories fall open.

 

“The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.”   
―  **Chuck Palahniuk** ,  **Choke**

 


End file.
